Scrolling through your phone’s address book to find someone to call or text can be a chore. So Samsung has launched a cameraphone that lets you text or call by tapping on their photo.
Samsung_haptic_8M_01 Samsung's Haptic 8M: lets you call friends from pictures
Called "Face Tagging", the feature allows you to call or text …

COMMENTS

Um, why?

Can anyone think of a common situation where pointing your phone at a picture is going to be quicker than just picking the person out of the contacts list?

Even if you've got a big list of contacts, it just doesn't seem worthwhile, especially if the probability of having to hand a picture of the person is proportional to the probability of them being in your speed dial / favourites list!

Re: AC

Genius

So now, instead of scrolling through a list of contacts, I just have to scroll through a list of pictures? That's progress for you. Of course, at least if my friend is standing right in front of me, I could just take a photo and use it to call him then and there.

Interface

@AC: I think you take a picture of your contact, and then later on, click on that person's face in the photograph to call them...? Or have I missed the point?

Either way, I completely agree that this is never going to be a "quick" interface. Honestly, if "scrolling through your phone’s address book to find someone to call or text can be a chore" then you really need to get a better handset.

@Interface

I thought it worked like this: You've got a photo of someone, let's say a family group photo, you point the phone at the person in the picture that you want to call at which point the phone recognises the face and calls ther person. I'm still calling 'Stop!' on this! Unless I really have missed the point.

As Bassey says though; shiny new thing. Who knows, it might turn into something useful one day.

I wonder if it works on the actual person too. So I can point the phone at ther person in front of me and it calls their phone (assuming, of course, I already have their number / photo). Now THAT would be pointless, but I'd still have to try it.

I think (hope) you have missed the point

Shirley you're all very wrong. It means (god, i hope it means) that you are looking through your pictures, maybe of the night before, see a pic of a mate you snapped and think "Ah, i need to ring him about getting breakfast" and just tap their face on the picture you have. Not faster than a contacts list, but an extra convenience. live face recognition based calling is clearly not quite as useful.

I think tapping their face and having a "send this pic as MMS" option might be useful...

Seems pretty cool idea to me, and is only a proof of concept of more powerful things you can do with face recognition.

@AC 17:10GMT

AC I think you have it. The story clearly says that it's matching against photos already stored in the address book against your contacts. And then it says you have another photo, maybe even a group photo, and you click on a face in that photo and it searches your address book, finds a matching headshot and calls that person.

It's barely useful but there will be the odd occasion when you want to contact a person in your photo album - your example of wanting to send the picture to the person in the picture is probably about the best one.

But @Bassey has the ultimate answer - it's shiny and new. Barely useful but really cool.